Running accounting on QuickBooks inevitably means that you’ll need to fetch tons of reports every week, month, or quarter. Intuit’s platform lives up to expectations, providing an easy way to access your QuickBooks Online reports. Downloading them for external use requires plenty of manual work but there’s also a way to automate the process. We’ll show you how!
QuickBooks Online reports comparison
QuickBooks Online comes with three pricing plans, each with a varying set of features. The differences can also apply to the reports offered. However, because financial reporting is such an essential part of any business, there’s a wide range of reports available even on the lower Smart Start plan.
Open QuickBooks reports using the Accountant view
You can access the Reports center from the menu to the left.
This section is split into two parts:
- Reports where all the available reports are stored, including standard, custom, and management reports.
- Performance center where you can view and create charts demonstrating the performance of your company.
As reports are the purpose of this article, we’ll focus solely on the first category for the duration of this article.
Open QuickBooks reports using the Business view
Go to Business Overview => Reports
You will see three tabs::
- Standard – standard reports available out of the box
- Custom reports – customized reports created by users of your QuickBooks Online account
- Management reports – customized reporting packages complete with cover page, table of contents, preliminary pages, reports and end notes.
Standard reports are grouped by their essence:
- Favourites: the reports you marked as favorite
- Business overview: Audit Log, Balance Sheet, and others
- Who owes you: Invoice List, Customer Balance Summary, and others
- Sales and customers: Customer Contact List, Sales by Customer Summary, and others
- What you owe: Unpaid Bills, Accounts payable ageing detail, and others
- Expenses and suppliers: Cheque Detail, Supplier Contact List, and others
- Sales tax: Tax Liability Report, VAT Summary Report, and others
- Employees: Employee Contact List, Recent/Edited Time Activities, and others
- For my accountant: General Ledger, Profit and Loss Comparison, and others
- Payroll: Time Activities by Employee Detail, Recent/Edited Time Activities, and others
Whereas, the availability of standard reports depends on the subscription plan you have.
Reports available on the Simple Start QuickBooks Online plan
The Simple Start plan features the following reports:
Available reports
- Audit Log
- Balance Sheet Comparison
- Balance Sheet Detail
- Balance Sheet
- Profit and Loss by % of Total Income
- Profit and Loss Comparison
- Profit and Loss year-to-date Comparison
- Profit and Loss by Customer
- Profit and Loss by Month
- Profit and Loss
- Quarterly Profit and Loss Summary
- Statement of Cash Flows
- Customer Contact List
- Deposit Detail
- Estimates by Customer
- Products and Services List
- Sales by Customer Summary
- Sales by Product/Service Summary
- Accounts receivable Summary
- Collections Report
- Customer Balance Summary
- Invoice List
- Open Invoices
- Statement List
- Check Detail
- Transaction List by Vendor
- Vendor Contact List
- Sales Tax Liability Report
- Taxable Sales Summary
- Account List
- Balance Sheet
- General Ledger
- Journal
- Profit and Loss
- Recent Transactions
- Reconciliation Reports
- Statement of Cash Flow
- Transaction List by Date
- Trial Balance
- Employee Details
- Employee Directory
- Multiple Worksites
- Paycheck List
- Payroll Billing Summary
- Payroll Deductions/Contributions
- Payroll Details
- Payroll Summary
- Payroll Tax Liability
- Payroll Tax Payments
- Payroll Tax and Wage Summary
- Retirement Plans
- Total Pay
- Total Payroll Cost
- Vacation and Sick Leave
- Workers’ Compensation
Users on the Simple Start plan can also customize reports as well as access management reports and compilations.
Reports available on the Essentials QuickBooks Online plan
The Essentials plan features all the reports available on the Smart Start plan, as well as:
Available reports
- Balance Sheet Summary
- Business Snapshot
- Profit and Loss Detail
- Realized Exchange Gains & Losses
- Unrealized Exchange Gains & Losses
- Income by Customer Summary
- Payment Methods List
- Sales by Customer Detail
- Sales by Customer Type Detail
- Sales by Product/Service Detail
- Transaction List by Customer
- Unbilled Charges
- Accounts receivable aging Detail
- Customer Balance Detail
- Accounts payable aging detail
- Accounts payable aging summary
- Bill Payments List
- Unpaid Bills
- Vendor Balance Detail
- Vendor Balance Summary
- Expenses by Vendor Summary
- Taxable Sales Detail
- Recent Automatic Transactions
- Recurring Template List
- Transaction Detail by Account
- Transaction List with Splits
The Essentials plan users can also take advantage of the Auto Sent Reports feature as well as Group reports.
Reports available on the Plus QuickBooks Online plan
Finally, being on the Plus plan means you can access quite a few more valuable reports. Everything from the lower plans is available and on top of that you’re getting:
Available reports
- Budget Overview
- Budget vs. Accruals
- Custom Summary Report
- Profit and Loss by Class
- Profit and Loss by Location
- Total Deposits and Payments (Beta)
- Inventory Valuation Detail
- Inventory Valuation Summary
- Physical Inventory Worksheet
- Sales by Class Detail
- Sales by Class Summary
- Sales by Location Detail
- Sales by Location Summary
- Time Activities by Customer Detail
- Unbilled Time
- Invoice and Received Payments
- Terms List
- Uninvoiced charges
- Uninvoiced time
- 1099 contractor Balance Detail
- 1099 contractor Balance Summary
- Bills and applied payments
- 1099 Transactions detail report
- Open Purchase Order List
- Open Purchase Order Detail
- Purchases by Class Detail
- Purchases by Location Detail
- Purchases by Product/Service Detail
- Purchases by Vendor Detail
- Employee Contact List
- Recent/Edited Time Activities
- Time Activities by Employee Detail
- Balance Sheet comparison
- Class List
- Location List
- Profit and Loss Comparison
- Recent/Edited Time Activities
- Time Activities by Employee Detail
QuickBooks custom reports
Over 100+ reports on the Plus plan may sound like enough for one lifetime. Often, though, you may feel that they don’t describe things the way you’d like them to be presented.
For example, the Balance Sheet reports show by default the data for this year-to-date. You may be more interested in, for example, this quarter only and you’d like to compare it every time with the respective quarter last year.
How to customize reports in QuickBooks Online?
You can run some basic adjustments such as Report period, Display columns by, and others right from the report page. Select the desired values and click Run Report.
You can access a more detailed customization menu via the Customize button on the top-right side of the screen. The main differences are various formatting and filtering options available here.
Don’t forget to click the Run report button underneath to reflect the changes.
How to create custom reports in QuickBooks Online?
If you regularly access a certain report and always need to make the same customizations, it would make more sense to save those changes for future use. You can do so by creating custom reports in QuickBooks Online.
Once you customized your report, click the Save customization button. Enter the report name. Optionally, you can group it with other custom reports or even share it with the community. Afterward, click Save.
This flow is the same for all custom reports in QuickBooks Online.
Where can you view custom reports in QuickBooks Online?
Go to the Reports menu and select the Custom reports tab. Here you will see all the custom reports in QuickBooks Online saved by users of your account.
When you create custom QuickBooks reports, you can choose to share them with your teammates or even with a community.
However, if you need to share QuickBooks custom reports externally, the easiest way to do this is to export them. QuickBooks Online allows you to manually export reports as PDF or Excel. For this, go to the list of your QuickBooks custom reports and select the drop-down menu next to the Edit button.
At the same time, you can optimize sharing of your reports if you automate their exports on a schedule using Coupler.io. This way, you won’t have to manually export data every time you need to refresh it.
You can schedule exports, say every day or every hour, to Google Sheets or Excel and share this spreadsheet with your stakeholders. We’ve explained the details in the section about QuickBooks automated reports.
Scheduled reports in QuickBooks Online
You can save each report in QuickBooks Online manually from its individual page. It’s a bit limited, as only Excel (.xlsx) and .pdf formats are available. Worst of all, you need to do it manually, which can be pretty inconvenient if you need to fetch a number of reports regularly.
Users on the Essentials and Plus plans can take advantage of the Auto Send Reports feature. In a nutshell, it allows you to send an email with a chosen report to a specific email address, at a chosen interval.
You can use this feature only with custom reports, but if you want to automatically send any of the standard reports, you can just save them as custom reports, the same as we did in the previous chapter. You don’t even need to make any adjustments.
Once you’ve created the desired custom reports, go to their list and click Edit to the right of the reports.
Toggle Set email schedule on. Then, choose when the emails should be sent and to whom. Use the default template or configure your own. You may also choose to attach the report as an Excel file, kind of QuickBooks export to Excel. Otherwise, the report will be sent in HTML format by default.
Once finished, click Save and close in the bottom-right corner.
How to schedule quarterly reports in QuickBooks Online?
It’s perhaps a bit counterintuitive but you can also send quarterly QuickBooks Online reports from the very same menu.
In the Set Recurrence section select:
- Repeats – Monthly
- Every – 3 months
Chances are, though, that the QuickBooks way of report scheduling won’t quite work for you.
Indeed, many accountants prefer to work with financial data from the comfort of a spreadsheet. This way, they can format it to their liking, run advanced formulas or even export the numbers into external services – for example, data visualization tools.
Although QuickBooks Online can be set to send Excel reports, it kind of goes against the purpose of an online platform, as the file still must be saved to a local drive.
Users of Google Sheets are also at a disadvantage as the process of importing .xlsx files into Drive is clunky and time-consuming.
Luckily, there’s another way to automatically export QuickBooks reports – a method as simple to set up but far more powerful.
QuickBooks automated reports to your favorite spreadsheet tool
If you’re planning to work with your data and generate reports from your favorite spreadsheet tool, Coupler.io is a much better solution.
Coupler.io can run automated data imports from QuickBooks to Google Sheets, MS Excel, as well as QuickBooks to BigQuery. The data can be synced as often as every 15 minutes and you can easily customize a schedule that works for you.
Learn how to set it up with our guide to exporting data from QuickBooks Online.
Coupler.io can import the following reports:
- Account List Detailed
- AP Ageing Detail
- AP Ageing Summary
- AR Ageing Detail
- AR Ageing Summary
- Balance Sheet
- Cash Flow
- Customer Balance
- Customer Balance Detail
- Customer Income
- Expenses by Vendor
- General Ledger Detail
- Inventory Valuation Summary
- Journal Report
- Profit And Loss Summary
- Profit And Loss Detail
- Sales by Class Summary
- Sales by Customer
- Sales by Department
- Sales by Product
- Tax Summary
- Transaction List
- Trial Balance
- Vendor Balance
- Vendor Balance Detail
Read our blog post to learn how to export check register from QuickBooks Online.
You can also approach it from a different angle and fetch the data about a specific data entity. The available options include:
- Account
- Attachable
- Bill
- Bill Payment
- Budget
- Class
- Company Info
- Credit Memo
- Customer
- Department
- Deposit
- Employee
- Estimate
- Exchange Rate
- Invoice Item
- Journal Entry
- Journal Code
- Payment
- Payment Method
- Preferences
- Purchase
- Purchase Order
- Refund Receipt
- Sales Receipt
- Tax Agency
- Tax Code
- Tax Rate
- Term
- Time Activity
- Transfer
- Vendor
- Vendor Credit
The guide on how to export chart of accounts in QuickBooks is also available on our blog.
The reports are available via the QuickBooks Reports source while the entities come with the QuickBooks source.
And here’s a sample export of a Transaction List by Customer report exported to Microsoft Excel:
How to automate QuickBooks reports export
We’ve blogged about how you can automate QuickBooks reports to Google Sheets in our guide to exporting data from QuickBooks Online. But here is a TLDR version of it:
- Sign up to Coupler.io, click Add importer and select your source app, Quickbooks Reports, and a destination app.
If you are going to create and automate a custom report in your spreadsheet, then you can choose QuickBooks as a source. This will let you export raw data from QuickBooks rather than data organized in the premade QuickBooks report.
- Connect to your QuickBooks account and select the report you want to export.
- Connect to your destination app account and select the file or table (for BigQuery) where to load your QuickBooks report.
- Schedule the automatic data refresh for your report and click Save and Run.
Here is what the integration may look like:
Can you export custom QuickBooks reports with Coupler.io?
With Coupler.io you can automate the export of reports and raw data from Quickbooks. This means you can customize your reports right in your spreadsheet. However, you can’t export the reports customized in QuickBooks.
Types of QuickBooks Online Reports
There are many different types of reports available in your QuickBooks account. We’ll now explain where to find the ones you’re interested in the most. We’ll also touch on how to export them with the method of your choice.
Standard payroll reports in QuickBooks Online
There are 19 reports available in the Payroll category, right at the bottom of the Reports page. Those of you on Smart Start and Essentials plans can access nearly all of them without any restrictions.
The exceptions are Payroll Summary by Employee, Recent/Edited Time Activities, and Time Activities by Employee Detail which are available only to Plus users.
Quarterly payroll reports in QuickBooks Online
To view a quarterly payroll report, open any of the reports in the category. Once there, adjust the time period to, for example, Last Quarter and press the Run report button.
If you’d like to save it for future use, click the Save customization button and name the report. From now on it will appear in the Custom reports section and will always include the data for the chosen period.
If you’d like to email it to yourself or someone else, follow the steps to schedule a quarterly report that we described earlier.
How to export employee reports in QuickBooks Online?
Employee Details and Employee Directory reports are available on every plan. You can fetch them in the standard way as Excel or PDF files and then save them on your device.
Depending on your needs, a direct export into a spreadsheet may prove to be more useful – especially if you plan to work with this data further. This can be automated with Coupler.io and the list of employees can be refreshed frequently, reflecting any changes you make on QuickBooks Online.
Here’s how to export employee data from QuickBooks Online.
A sample export looks like this:
How to export productivity reports in QuickBooks Online?
Although there’s no productivity report available in QuickBooks Online per se, the Time Activities by Employee Detail report is probably the closest thing you’ll find. You’ll find it in the Payroll section of the Reports page.
You can adjust it to some extent, save it as a custom report or schedule recurring reports to be sent to any email address.
An interesting thing to do would be pulling all time entries available with Coupler.io and building a productivity report in your spreadsheet. With a bit of time at your disposal, you could also export the data into a tool like Data Studio and build a wonderful, self-updating productivity report there.
Here’s how to get QuickBooks Online time data.
Budget reports in QuickBooks Online
There are two budget reports available in QuickBooks Online, both nested under the Business Overview category. These are Budget Overview and Budget vs Actuals. They’re only available on the Plus plan.
The icon for saving either report isn’t available at first because of the sheer number of columns the reports contain. Scroll a bit to the right and you’ll find the icon.
Budget from QuickBooks Online can also be fetched into a spreadsheet with Coupler.io. Here’s a sample export:
Accountant reports in QuickBooks Online
There’s a long list of reports available in the For my accountant section, the exact set depends on your plan.
The majority of reports are available for all plans. The following are only accessible on Essentials and higher plans:
- Recent Automatic Transactions
- Recurring Template List
- Transaction Detail by Account
- Transaction List with Splits
What’s more, Plus members can also access:
- Balance Sheet comparison
- Class List
- Location List
- Profit and Loss Comparison
Each report can be saved in the standard way, as an Excel file or PDF.
Accountant automatic reports in QuickBooks Online
Accountant reports are something you may often want to export out of the platform – for further processing or to keep in your records.
This dull process can be automated with QuickBooks Online. Each report can be sent to a specific email address at a certain scheduled interval. Refer to the Schedule reports in the QuickBooks Online section for details on how to set it up.
If you plan to work further with any of these reports, exporting them directly into Excel or, for example, Google Sheets is probably a better idea. The advantage is that the data will be fetched into a typical spreadsheet format that allows for it to be formatted, put into formulas, or processed in any other way.
Most standard accounting reports are also available for the Coupler.io export. These include Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Journal or Transaction List. Refer to the earlier chapters for instructions on how to set these up.
Vendor reports in QuickBooks Online
Vendor reports are nested in two separate sections in the Reports menu – What you owe as well as Expenses and suppliers. QuickBooks uses the terms “Vendor” and “Supplier” interchangeably so Vendor reports are referred to on the platform as Supplier reports.
There’s a very limited number of supplier reports available on the Smart Start plan, Check Detail, Transaction List by Supplier and Supplier Contact List being the only ones you can access.
Users on the Essentials plan get quite a few other reports, including Vendor Balance Detail and Summary. The Plus plan comes with about a dozen additional reports.
Plenty of information about vendors can be fetched with Coupler.io. You can pull either raw vendor data or different vendor reports, right into your spreadsheet.
Expense reports in QuickBooks Online
Expense reports are grouped with vendor (supplier) reports as we discussed in the earlier chapter. There’s a very limited set of reports on Smart Start and Essentials plans while the Plus users can enjoy all expense reports. This includes:
- Open Purchase Order List
- Open Purchase Order Detail
- Purchases by Class Detail
- Purchases by Location Detail
- Purchases by Product Service/Detail
- Purchases by Vendor Detail
With Coupler.io you can import the Expenses by Vendor report, regardless of your plan.
How to view reconciliation reports in QuickBooks Online?
You’ll find reconciliation reports in the For my accountant section of Reports. It’s easy to distinguish as it’s the only report on the list that doesn’t have a three-dots menu to the right, meaning it cannot be customized.
You can also view reconciliation details via the Accounting -> Reconcile menu.
Reconciliation reports are available on all QuickBooks plans.
Sales reports in QuickBooks Online
There are nine sales reports available in QuickBooks Online.
- Smart Start users only have one available – Sales by Customer Summary.
- Essentials users have additional access to Sales by Customer Detail and by Customer Type Detail. What’s more, they can also view Sales by Product/Service Detail and Summary.
- Plus members get all the reports, including some QuickBooks Online Class reports – Sales by Class Detail, by Class Summary as well as by Location Detail and by Location Summary.
You can find the available reports under the Sales and Customers category.
Can I create an MRR report in QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online doesn’t feature any MRR or ARR reports. At the same time, it doesn’t seem possible to even estimate either metric based on the data available in QBO.
You could technically pull your revenue numbers and split them into months in a spreadsheet. Based on that, it would seem that you can calculate the recurring revenue. BUT… it’s not that simple.
QuickBooks Online (or any accounting software for that matter) doesn’t differentiate between new revenues and those coming from renewals. They also fail to notice deals that were not renewed for another period, skewing the MRR stats in the process.
As such, calculating MRR based on QBO revenues is more like calculating an average monthly revenue over a certain period, rather than an actual MRR metric.
There are plenty of tools, though, that can be plugged into your product and can pull the vital metrics from there. It’s a far more reliable approach than trying to make something out of QuickBooks Online reports.
Inventory reports in QuickBooks Online
There are two inventory reports: Inventory Valuation Detail and Inventory Valuation Summary, both sitting under the Sales and customers category. Both are available only to Plus members.
Coupler.io also features an option of pulling the Inventory Valuation Summary report into a spreadsheet.
Job cost reports in QuickBooks Online
The job cost report in QuickBooks Online is referred to as Time cost by employee or supplier. Also, it’s a bit hidden for some reason.
Rather than going to the usual Reports tab, head to Projects instead. You’ll need to have projects enabled on your QuickBooks account for this tab to show up.
While in there, click on the project you’re interested in and then Project Reports.
Then, select the Time cost by employee or supplier report for this project and you’ll see the desired report.
While in there, you can also access other project reports in QuickBooks Online – Project profitability and Unbilled time and expenses.
Reports by class in QuickBooks Online
There are a number of reports where the data can be differentiated by class. These are:
- Profit and Loss by Class
- Sales by Class Detail
- Sales by Class Summary
- Purchases by Class Detail
The reports are only available for Plus users. What’s more, they can also access a separate Class List report.
How to see graph reports in QuickBooks Online?
If you’d like to see a more visual report, you certainly need to check out the Business Snapshot report. You’ll find it in the usual Reports menu, under Business Overview.
Management reports in QuickBooks Online
Management reports are more of a feature than a new type of report. Basically, it allows you to format any of the existing reports into a good-looking PDF template, with a cover page, executive summary, and other beautiful components. You can also add notes to the file.
When you first enter the Management reports tab you’ll see just two default reports – Basic Company Financials and Extended Company Financials. We’ll now show you how to create a new one.
How to create a new management report in QuickBooks Online?
First of all, decide on the report you’d like to use as a management report. You can use any of the existing reports but if you plan to make any adjustments to it, you will first need to save it as a custom report.
- Same as we did earlier in this article, open the report and make the necessary changes. Click Save customization, give the report a unique name and save. From now on, it will appear in the Custom reports section.
- Go to the Management reports tab. Choose either a Basic or Extended type of report. Select the Report period and then click View -> Edit next to a chosen report.
- Next, choose Reports and then Add new report. Find the desired report on the dropdown list and adjust any details if needed.
- Click the Save and Close button in the bottom-right corner.
- The report will now appear on the list. Click View to the right. A preview will appear which you can save as a PDF or print right away.
QuickBooks Online Reports – Summary
Even on the most basic QBO plan you have access to plenty of rich reports. They make it easy to report and analyze data at will, and if you’re missing something, chances are you can customize the existing reports and find the information you need.
If you prefer to work with your QuickBooks data from the comfort of a spreadsheet, consider exporting QuickBooks reports to Google Sheets instead. If you’re more into Excel, we’ve recently added it as a destination too.
Thanks for reading!
